Revisiting History Through Objects, and a Long-Gone Game Show

New-York Historical Society A footlocker stocked with the wartime supplies of a Union Army mapmaker is on display as part of “The Civil War in 50 Objects” exhibition by the New-York Historical Society. .

Tracing history through objects is popular these days. Neil McGregor, the director of the British Museum, did it in 700 best-selling pages, and for the last couple of months, the New-York Historical Society has had an exhibition called “The Civil War in 50 Objects.”

Finding the 50 objects involves something of a scavenger hunt â€" they are on display in different places at the society, at 170 Central Park West, at West 77th Street. All 50 came from the society’s collection of about 1 million Civil War-era items, “a definitive record of slavery, secession, rebellion and reunion from the time these movements first roiled the city and the nation,” according to the Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. He made the final decisions on which 50 objects were chosen, and which were not, after members of the museum’s staff had winnowed the possibilities to 75.

The 50 objects hint at politics and power â€" in a gallery on the second floor are the laurel leaves that lined Lincoln’s bier when his body lay in state at City Hall. But some of the objects touch on the ordinary. There is a footlocker stocked with the wartime supplies and gear of a Union Army mapmaker.

But when the 380-page companion book landed on my desk, the first thing that came to mind was: This is not new. What popped into my head was an almost-50-year-old memory that illustrates the place that objects have in history.

This is a memory that risks trivializing objects that tell important stories, for it is the memory of a child â€" me â€" and a game show that was on when I was sick and stayed home in the cold winter of third grade, a game show called “The Object Is.” It was on the air for only 13 weeks in late 1963 and early 1964 and starred Dick Clark, already famous for “American Bandstand” but not yet a mainstay of New Year’s Eve countdowns. It opened with a deep-voiced announcer explaining the premise, which was not that different from telling the story of human history (or the Civil War) through objects.

“Every famous person, living or dead, real or fictional, can be associated with objects,” the announcer declared. “If the object is a kite, you think of Benjamin Franklin.” If the clue was an apple, he continued, the person could be Sir Isaac Newton or William Tell. But if a second clue was an arrow, “you know it’s William Tell.”

In the first episode, the one that turned up on YouTube after Mr. Clark’s death last year, the contestants mentioned Davy Crockett, Charles A. Lindbergh and the conductor Leopold Stokowski, among others. One of those contestants was a man named Gerald Huckaby, whom the announcer introduced, with no hint of humor, as “a bachelor professor at a girls’ college.”

I tracked him down to see what he remembered.

Not much, it turned out, because he had been a contestant on more game shows than he could keep track of.

He mentioned “Your Surprise Package,” a game show on CBS in 1961 and 1962 with George Fennaman (who had been Groucho Marx’s sidekick on “You Bet Your Life,” later syndicated as “The Best of Groucho.”) “They liked the way I was excited on camera,” he recalled, “and they asked me to be on a number of first-time quiz shows.” “The Object Is” was one of them, he said after watching the episode on YouTube.

But “The Object Is” was no thrill-a-minute production. “Between shots,” he said, “they had so many pauses that I would be reading the ‘Odyssey,’ because that’s what I was teaching.”

Mr. Huckaby, 80, said he spent 19 years on the faculty at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, the alma mater of the actress Angie Dickinson and the novelist Helen Maria Viramontes. Several years after he appeared on “The Object Is,” he wrote a book of poems that was illustrated by Corita Kent, who, as Sister Mary Corita, had been the chairwoman of the art department at Immaculate Heart. (As the antiwar protests of the 1960s gained momentum, she became known for silk-screen images of love and peace. She designed a “love” stamp issued in 1985, the year before her death.)

He also lost his status as a bachelor professor. He married one of his students.

Ever the English professor, he was careful about the sequence of tenses. “She wasn’t a student when I married her,” he said. “She had been my student.”

“I was the moderator for the school newspaper,” he said. “She was on the staff. We had our end-of-the-year banquet. It happened to be on my birthday. She walks up to me and says, ‘It’s my birthday, too.’”